by: Lynette Webb
“Life caching” as a concept has been around for a while and has always fascinated me. For their afficionados, Twitter and the constant chatter on Myspace-type boards are the first services that, to me, come close to enabling capture of the minutiae of daily life.
Of course, it’s still almost entirely text-based but given the speed of advances in compression & computing power, we can’t be that far off from the first experimental tools that your wear, like a brooch perhaps, that automatically take a capture – whether it be an audio snippet, photo or video – every X minutes throughout a day or whatever you set. (Of course it would need to give you the choice of switching it off, deleting etc).
Nokia were among the first to attempt to commercialise the life-caching concept in a digital setting, several years ago now via their mobile lifeblogging service. It was strange though – even though I had a Nokia phone at the time, and loved the life caching concept, Nokia’s implementation never appealed to me. First, I didn’t want to be locked into only Nokia phones (no matter how great they may be, I have an aversion to being trapped). Second, it seemed so incomplete to just track things via my mobile but ignore all the activity via my PC. Maybe one day they’ll converge but it’s not happened yet. Third, it demanded too much pro-activity – I had to remember to take photos of things I wanted to store or record, it couldn’t be automated.
I don’t think this is going to arrive in the next few years, I think we’re talking decades. But I hope it arrives before I’m too old to benefit. 🙂
Photo thanks to Cwoehrl www.flickr.com/photos/cwoehrl/73838188/
Quote is from the New York Times www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/science/31essa.html?ex=1319950… – slightly paraphrased to fit, but meaning unchanged.
Original Post: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/493579027/
